And When She Was Good (5 page)

“The way things work, I'm allowed to trade it to only one man, and then it's on his terms, you know? And it's totally a
transaction.
Like, if I find some rich guy, he might ask me to sign a prenup. At the very least, I'd have to live where he wants to live, have his kids. Whereas if I could sell it piecemeal, I'd make so much more. It's like a really big diamond—sometimes it's worth more if you make lots of little diamonds from it.”

Heloise wasn't sure that was true, but Sophie probably knew more about diamonds than she did. Although Sophie's family wasn't rich, she had grown up in New York City, in proximity to people with great fortunes. Still, Heloise understood how Sophie felt. Her beauty, her sexual allure, was a commodity, yet she was prohibited to trade on it. To be sure, Sophie could “make” more by marrying a millionaire than she would working for Heloise for a few years, but she would be on call 24/7. Why not work eight to ten hours a week and earn thousands?

When Heloise hired Sophie, she gave her the talk she gave all the girls: No drugs, they're illegal. Bondage had to be preapproved; don't let just anyone tie you up. And it was better to use condoms, always, for everything. Yes, Heloise asked her clients to submit blood tests, but they could be up to six months old. (Most men who went to prostitutes didn't mind taking regular blood tests, she had found. She just wished she could get a piece of
that
action, own a lab. The fees they charged were ridiculous.) But there were men who would pay extra for not wearing a condom. Technically, Heloise forbade this, but it was ultimately between the girls and the clients, just like tipping. And, as with tipping, she couldn't prevent it or regulate it. She recommended reporting cash income, or at least some of it. She recommended using condoms and avoiding drugs. What the girls did, however, was between them and their consciences.

Some people would call what Heloise did turning a blind eye. But she wasn't blind. She knew. She
knew.
What she had given Sophie was a winking eye—go ahead, have unprotected sex for the extra bucks! What had it added up to, in the end? A pair of beautiful shoes, a dress, a sofa? Not enough for a modest car, even. And certainly not enough to buy Trizivir every month, at seventeen hundred bucks a month, for the rest of her life, which would probably be at once too short and too long.

Leo was right: There was nothing to keep Sophie from working some kind of job, technically. Except for her raging self-pity. She sat in the little apartment she rented in North Baltimore, in one of the older, shabby-chic buildings along University Parkway. It was the same building that housed the One World Café, not that Sophie cared about what she put into her body anymore. She ate the most astonishing array of junk, although she remained thin, too thin. She was still beautiful, but it was more ethereal now. The juicy promise that had attracted everyone to her was gone.

All of Sophie's regular clients were gone, too, expunged from Heloise's rolls. She had been straightforward, notifying each that he'd been with a girl infected with HIV. She urged all of them to get tested. Of the ten men who had been with Sophie in the three months before her diagnosis, seven railed at Heloise, said she was running a slipshod business and that they would take her for everything she was worth if they found out they were infected. Three accepted the news quietly.

Heloise was pretty sure that the man who had infected Sophie was one of the first group, although she could never decide which one it was. Deny, deny, deny. That's the way it goes. To be safe, she felt she had to let them all go, which she could ill afford. Ten regulars, gone from the rolls. After Sophie, new girls were told that failing to practice safe sex was grounds for firing. Barn door, meet the gone horse.

“I'll visit her soon,” Heloise promises Leo. “See what she wants to do.”

“I talked to her not long ago,” he says.

“You did? I would prefer you not talk to the employees directly.”

“She called me. Said it was a question about her W-2, but she also wanted to know if she qualified for workers' compensation. I told her that was only for injuries and liabilities that were part of a job, not for long-term illnesses, no matter how grave. I'm not sure even a hospital worker could get coverage for HIV—that is, unless the worker could prove some sort of negligence on the employer's part. But, of course, it has no bearing here.”

Leo's face is bland, so bland. He doesn't blink. Then again, he never blinks.
This is trouble,
Heloise thinks. She's just not sure what brand of trouble it is.

1992

E
arly in
her relationship with Billy, Helen worked out a way to “meet” him at the movies,
a ruse that meant he didn't have to come to the house. Now seventeen, she was
technically allowed to date by her father's ever-shifting rules, but Billy had
become increasingly paranoid. He said he'd learned that he had violated
statutory-rape laws with her. He said he was fearful her father would not
approve of him, and it was better to go behind his back than to seek his
permission, be denied, and then go against an out-and-out prohibition. He
said—

“It's okay, Billy. I'll meet you there, like you
want.”

On this particular night, he arrived late, with
only a few minutes to spare. He had forgotten his wallet. She bought their
tickets and refreshments—popcorn and Sno-Caps and a large soda for Billy, a Diet
Coke for herself. Billy often mentioned how beautiful his mother was before she
gained weight. Her husband, Gus, clearly thought she was still a looker, but he
didn't know how gorgeous she'd been when Billy was a little boy. Billy knew it
was shallow, but he could never love a woman who wasn't thin. Helen, who had
never been particularly concerned about her weight, had become very
self-conscious about her body. But Billy did so much to care for her. Watching
her weight seemed the least she could do for him.

The movie was about a woman with a perfect life.
Which meant, of course, that it was all a lie. In Helen's experience, movies
either began with perfection and shattered it or proceeded in the opposite
direction, starting with someone poor and miserable and rewarding that person
with a fairy-tale ending. At least those were the sorts of movies that came to
the multiplex in Helen's hometown. In this movie the woman was beautiful, with
one of those vague jobs that intrigued Helen. Her main responsibility seemed to
be walking through an art gallery in beautiful clothes, making vague gestures at
the paintings and sculptures. She and her handsome husband lived in an apartment
filled with beautiful things, and they went to parties where everyone else was
gorgeous, if not quite as gorgeous as they were. They were in negotiations to
buy an even more beautiful house, something starkly modern overlooking water, so
their beautiful daughter could play outside with their adorably ugly dog.

Then a friend from the gallery called the beautiful
woman and said he had something urgent to discuss. “But not on the phone!” Helen
hid her face in the crook of Billy's arm, knowing that the friend would soon be
dead. The beautiful woman saw her husband in the Diamond District when he was
supposed to be in Toronto. The beautiful husband turned out to have a different
name, a whole different life from what he had claimed. He'd been stealing things
from her gallery for years and replacing them with clever copies. He tried to
kill her, but she tricked him, using her knowledge of trompe l'oeil—“It means
‘fool the eye,' ” Helen whispered to Billy, thinking he would be impressed by
her knowledge—to lure him into an elevator shaft, where he fell to his death.
Somehow the movie seemed to think this was a happy ending—he was dead, but it
wasn't her fault, not exactly. The final frames showed the beautiful woman,
beautiful daughter, and adorably ugly dog in a new apartment—smaller, more
casual, but still expensive to Helen's eye, which wasn't easily fooled.

“I can't get over what a dope she was,” Helen said.
Billy shrugged.

I
can't get over what a dope I was.”

It was six months later, and Helen was sitting on a
sagging mattress in a cheap motel in Baltimore. Addicts are good liars,
especially if you love them, and it had taken her a long time to sort out
Billy's lies, to become aware of his giveaway tic, which was the laundry list of
reasons he provided whenever he knew he was on thin ice. Billy's lies, like
trends, came in threes.

Not that she was oblivious to his lies, but most of
them were harmless, a habit born, he said—he lied—from his stepfather's
terrifying strictness. Even that proved to be a lie; Billy's stepfather had not
come along until he was almost twenty. But Helen, who lied to Hector all the
time, was vulnerable to believing that lying could be essential to one's
survival. Billy lied about the things that made him late, inventing traffic jams
and accidents. He lied about his age. He was twenty-six, not twenty-three. He
had thought twenty-six would scare her off. He lied about his role at the
restaurant, although it's possible that he and his mother really did believe he
was being groomed to run it. His stepfather, however, had no such illusions.

About three months into Helen's relationship with
Billy, Mr. Gus showed up one day about an hour before opening, when the
waitresses were doing their prep. He said he wanted to meet with each of them
one-on-one.

“The cash register is short on certain days,” he
said when Helen took a seat opposite him. “It's always when you're working.”

She felt as if she'd been hit. The odd thing was
that Mr. Gus's voice wasn't angry or accusatory, although his dour face gave
every pronouncement a melancholy edge. He sat back, waiting for her
response.

“I never—I wouldn't—this is a good job, Mr. Gus,
and I value it. Plus, I don't even touch the cash register, except to cash out
my charge tips, and then Rhonda or someone does it for me, per the rules—”

“Never by more than twenty or forty, but always
short. If it were just people being bad at making change, the odds should favor
me every now and then, don't you think?”

She tried to regain her composure but found she
could not stop gasping. She had withstood beatings from her father more easily
than this.

Mr. Gus continued. “And once or twice some
inventory disappeared. Booze, the top-shelf stuff. Again you were working both
nights.”

Her instinct, ugly and swift, was to shift the
blame to someone else. She realized that it wasn't an attractive impulse. “Am I
the only one who worked all those shifts? No one else? Rhonda picks up most of
the same shifts I do.”

“It's not Rhonda,” he said. “And you know what? I
don't think it's you. But there is something else common to every shift you
work, no?”

“Well, I work Friday and Saturday nights now,
unless I switch with someone. And those are the busiest nights, with the most
cash coming in, but—”

He held up a palm. His hands were huge, scarred
from his early days as a line cook. He had come to the United States in the
1940s with his parents. He'd been a marine in the Korean War. Billy said
gangsters had given him his start and that he was still friendly with what Billy
called the “criminal element” of central Pennsylvania.

“I know the
malaka
comes to see you whenever you work.”

“Sir?”

“My stepson, the idiot. I know you are with
him.”

She honestly thought they had hidden their
relationship from everyone. The other waitresses assumed that she'd slept with
Billy once or twice, because he stopped paying attention to her at work. After
all, that's what had happened to all of them. Sex was okay, apparently, with
Billy's mother. She drew the line only at relationships.

“Does his mother—”

“She doesn't see what she doesn't want to see when
it comes to him. So no, she doesn't see that he likes a girl who is much too
young for him. And too good for him, but there's not a girl on this earth who's
not too good for him. She doesn't see that he has nice clothes and a nice car,
better than he could afford on the allowance that she gives him.”

“Allowance?”

“Yeah, she calls it a salary, but it comes out of
her pocket, so what would you call it? An allowance, like children get, only he
is a man. And he's stealing from me. I want you to tell him to stop.”

“But—why me?” She was thinking that no one could be
more formidable than Mr. Gus. There was no doubt that Billy feared him. Whereas
she seemed to have less and less control over him. A cynical person would say
that was because she had given in to him, that he'd gotten what he wanted from
her, but Helen believed it was more complicated than that. Her mother couldn't
get Hector to do anything, whereas Barbara, his first wife, occasionally wangled
money or gifts from him. It had something to do with those rats that Helen had
learned about at school and the little lever they pushed for food. Her father
always got the pellet from her mother. Not just sex but wholehearted approval,
constant, cringing affection. Barbara blew hot and cold. She didn't
like
him, and Hector wanted to be liked.

But Helen couldn't hold anything back from Billy,
didn't want to. It felt good to love someone.

“Why don't I talk to him? Because if I tell him, he
will go to his mother and cry, and she will make my life a misery. But if you
tell him that he must stop or you will lose your job, then he cannot cry to her.
He will have to choose.” He gave her what he seemed to think was a sympathetic
look, although even Mr. Gus's sympathetic looks were a little scary. “If you're
lucky, he will have you fired.”

“I don't see how that would be lucky. I need this
job. I'll have to get another one if I lose it, and there aren't many good
restaurants in town.”

“If it comes to that, I will help you. Gladly.
You're a good girl—or were, before him. But you have to know he's no good. What
kind of person steals like that, from family? I'll tell you—a drug addict.”

“Oh, no, Billy doesn't use drugs.”

Mr. Gus snorted. “Good luck,” he said, showing her
the door.

Billy said it was lies, all lies. That his
stepfather was jealous of him and trying to get rid of him. That he once or
twice made change from the cash register but had never taken so much as a
dollar. He said Mr. Gus was sleeping with Rhonda and they had cooked up this
plan to get rid of both of them. But he wasn't an addict. He was going to be the
manager of Il Cielo—how could he stay away? But for her he would.

And he did, for almost a month, a month in which he
became increasingly jumpy and paranoid. He knew things about his stepfather, he
said. Things that could get him arrested. His stepfather knew he knew and was
going to make Billy disappear, make it look like an accident. He needed to blow
town, but he didn't have the funds. Besides, how could he leave her? He loved
her. He had abandoned his own future for her.

“I have money, Billy,” she told him. “Not a lot,
but I've managed to save some.”

“No, I couldn't do that to you.”

His initial refusal made him seem trustworthy.

“I want you to. I want you to be safe.”

“There's no life for me without you.”

“Then I'll go with you.”

“Okay, but only if we get married. You can do it
fast, down in Baltimore, without a blood test. We could be married
tomorrow.”

Marriage. She had never thought about it. She had
thought about going to college, getting a job.
Marriage.
Her father had refused to give that to her mother, so it
must be a precious thing. Yes, she would marry him. That wouldn't keep her from
doing anything else. She was already working and going to school at the same
time. She could do that in Baltimore, too.

“Yes,” she said.

“When you come to work on Saturday, bring your
money—and a suitcase, with as many clothes as you can manage. Stash it behind
the Dumpster, and I'll put it in the trunk of my car.”

He showed up that Saturday in a suit, presiding as
manager. He ignored Helen so thoroughly that she began to wonder if she had
imagined his instructions. At closing he chewed her out, said one of her tables
had complained about her attitude and that he was going to make her stay late
and start inventory as punishment. Once everyone was gone, he showed her the
night's cash receipts, waiting to be deposited. “Going to be deposited straight
in our account, baby.” They headed out of town in his car, not the sports car he
had once driven but a plain, boxy old Datsun. “Gotta keep a low profile,” he
said. “He'll be coming after us.”

They would get married the very next day, he
promised. Well, not the next day, but Monday, at the courthouse. They were going
to start over. Billy was going to open a real restaurant, a good one, where the
desserts weren't made of Marshmallow Fluff.

She fell asleep in the car. The next thing she
knew, they were in a motel room outside Baltimore, Maryland, which turned out
not to be the place that one could get married right away. That was a different
county, back in the direction they had driven. Here, in the city, there was a
forty-eight-hour waiting period after taking out the license, a fact that threw
Billy off. Plus, he was annoyed at the cost of the license. And he was out of
drugs—not that she understood that yet—and he was getting irritable, and it
turned out that maybe he had taken some things from his stepfather that weren't
his to take—not just that night's receipts but all those other shortages, the
booze, jewelry from his mother's bedroom—and maybe there were other people, less
forgiving, who wanted money from him, too. See, Billy didn't use drugs, but he
sold them, and there had been some bad luck, someone had stolen his stash, which
he hadn't exactly paid for, but how could he pay for it if he didn't have the
drugs to sell? They needed fast money, cash money, and the best place to make
that, Billy had heard, was on the Block, where Helen would make great tips just
for dancing. Just dancing! And what did it matter if men saw her naked? She was
beautiful; men should see her and admire her. They wouldn't be allowed to touch
her. Other men could look, but only Billy could touch.